Great news: Beijing air quality upgraded to “hazardous”

posted at 3:51 pm on January 14, 2013 by Ed Morrissey

Hey, it’s a step up from “off the charts,” as CNN’s Steven Jiang reports from China’s capital. After being buried in smog so thick that even the Chinese media began to report it, residents lined up at hospitals and worried parents kept their children indoors:

The Washington Post reports on the new openness in Chinese media, which may reflect the desperate straits of Beijing residents more than it does actual reform by the government:

One of Beijing’s worst rounds of air pollution kept schoolchildren indoors and sent coughing residents to hospitals Monday, but this time something was different about the murky haze: the government’s transparency in talking about it.

While welcomed by residents and environmentalists, Beijing’s new openness about smog also put more pressure on the government to address underlying causes, including a lag in efforts to expand Western-style emissions limits to all of the vehicles in Beijing’s notoriously thick traffic. …

Even state-run media gave the smog remarkably critical and prominent play. “More suffocating than the haze is the weakness in response,” read the headline of a front-page commentary by the Communist Party-run China Youth Daily.

Government officials — who have played down past periods of heavy smog — held news conferences and posted messages on microblogs discussing the pollution.

The wave of pollution peaked Saturday with off-the-charts levels that shrouded Beijing’s skyscrapers in thick gray haze. Expected to last through Tuesday, it was the severest smog since the government began releasing figures on PM2.5 particles — among the worst pollutants — early last year in response to a public outcry.

Check out the pictures to see just how bad it got before abating somewhat today. I grew up in Los Angeles during an era with frequent Stage 1 smog alerts and occasional Stage 2 alerts, and there were days when it hurt to breathe – especially when spending time in the foothills. I never saw anything like this as a child or adult, and can’t imagine how it feels to breathe in Beijing now. I doubt the masks help much, either.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, either. The issue of air quality came up during the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, too, with considerable concern over the health of athletes competing in an atmosphere that looked like this:

It’s too bad that Beijing isn’t run by the kind of government that Tom Friedman thinks can solve all its problems because of a lack of dissent and obstruction by political opposition, huh? Or for that matter, Ray LaHood.

Ed I grew up (El Monte) during the worst of L.A. smog. My guess is that the San Bernardino/Riverside areas would have experienced smog like this given the prevailing wind patterns. I can remember driving through Riverside and needing my lights on at 4 pm during the summer smog season.

Me too. I grew up there. My Mom still lives there. They have a bunch of socialists on the City Council. I’m talking about the new ones. I know, because went to school with them. Soda tax anyone, and they have a 10% or 9.75% sale tax.

A country of Slaves and Slave labor ruled by evil communists elite… What else do you expect… If they do not give a damn about the life, liberty, and happiness of their people where the super vast majority of them is living in an abject poverty that we cannot even imagine, where there are no free men and women, where the communists kill and imprison anyone who opposes them, then why do you expect them to care about pollution…

Sorry, my bad….they don’t call it “Dictatorial”……in the US it’s called Executive Order.

PappyD61 on January 14, 2013 at 3:57 PM

Despite that Obama desires to be a communist dictator he is not going to be, not even close… If he is then you PappyD61 would be either dead or in jail, your children will be working as slave labor in a facotry for 50 cents an hours, and this forum where you are expressing your freedom of speech would not exist to begin with… That is China…

All things in moderation. The EPA’s overzealousness has been detrimental than beneficial at times.

hawkeye54 on January 14, 2013 at 4:23 PM

It’s not so much that the EPA has done a bang up job of cleaning up the air over certain areas of the US, it’s that our technology is a little beyond burning trash for heat, dirty factories, coal powered furnaces in houses, etc etc. As technology improves, so does our enviornment. China has a smog problem because they have crappy, inefficient factories, power plants, vehicles, and furnaces that spew out a ton of smoke and random particles.

I’ll never forget my first visit to China (Shanghai and some of the surrounding area). I immediately developed respiratory problems.

The Greenie/caps-on-carbon-emissions/global warming crowd love to vilify the US in this regard when the reality is that the US has some of the strictest environmental regulations on the planet. Do they seriously think that China and other places give a flying crap about their emissions? They don’t. That’s totalitarianism for you. And that is what Obama wants here. Wake up green-tards.

I’ll never forget my first visit to China (Shanghai and some of the surrounding area). I immediately developed respiratory problems.

The Greenie/caps-on-carbon-emissions/global warming crowd love to vilify the US in this regard when the reality is that the US has some of the strictest environmental regulations on the planet. Do they seriously think that China and other places give a flying crap about their emissions? They don’t. That’s totalitarianism for you. And that is what Obama wants here. Wake up green-tards.

WhatSlushfund on January 14, 2013 at 4:37 PM

The problem is that like a lot of mass movements that started with good intentions and initially produced some good results, the left hijacked and turned it into a vote machine for the Democrat party like so many other causes – the unions, feminism, etc.

The “green” movement these days has very little to do with helping the environment and much more with neo-pantheists and US foreign enemies who want to cripple the US economy, and communists who see an excellent opportunity to loot more money from the taxpayer and further harm their enemies, the American middle class. The amazing ability of the communists to hollow out and consume every non-explicitly conservative political organization has never ceased to astonish me.

I’ve also visited Shanghai, and a few other places in interior China. I’d wager that you’d be hard pressed to find a city in the entire country where the air quality’s good. You could almost choke on the smell of coal ash on a lot of days.

Once, we had dinner with a local government official, who had recently returned from a trip to the U.S. He’d been to Atlanta, D.C., and New York. I asked him what he thought, and he cracked a big smile and said, “Air very clean.”

My friend who travels to Chengdu married his translater. When he brought her to the USA and they visited me, she commented that we could see all the stars at night here. She said she had not seen stars at night in Chengdu for some time.

It’s too bad that Beijing isn’t run by the kind of government that Tom Friedman thinks can solve all its problems because of a lack of dissent and obstruction by political opposition, huh? Or for that matter, Ray LaHood.